This audio CD brings to you a special Play of Shiva & Shakti 80 minutes class recoded live at 2016 North West Yoga Feast and accompanied by divine live music composed on the spot by Nathan Zavalney.

The Play of Shiva & Shakti – Yoga & Shamanic Journeys Off the Beaten Path is a unique series of teachings growing out of Ivo & Cosetta’s combined 32 years of yoga, shamanic and meditation training, study and sharing, and represents the alchemy of their lives thus far as a married couple, lovers and teachers.

My bet is you take very few, if any. You are not alone. By failing to pause and take a deep breath, you are doing your body, mind and spirit a disservice and may even be contributing to poor health.

In the Western world, we live a mostly sedentary, plugged-in life punctuated by an incessant stream of stimuli demanding our attention at every turn – social media, email, text messages, television, traffic and hyper-competitiveness at work, to name a few. As a result, our mind and body are constantly and unconsciously pushed into “fight or flight” mode, an automatic body response regulated by our sympathetic nervous system (SNS) that is associated with a shallow, chest-level, high-frequency breathing pattern.

While our “fight or flight” response is a great latent gift we possess, problems arise when we spend most of our waking (and sometimes even sleeping) time in this mode.

By consistently staying in a heightened state of “fight or flight,” we create a biological imbalance and literally burnout our life force, or Prana, as we say in yoga. Have you ever felt so stressed, anxious and tired that you felt paralyzed? That’s your body response to a continuous injection of stress hormones including adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol into our bloodstream at a great expense to our health, resulting in stress, anxiety and illnesses.

Brain’s ability to rewire itself in relation to changes in behavior, environment and thinking patterns—or brain plasticity—is heavily impacted by mindfulness practices. Simultaneously, the discovery of the enteric nervous system (or the brain in the gut) has given an entirely new meaning to the mind/body relationship, shedding light on the mechanism by which mind wellbeing positively impacts the body and vice versa.

Yet, despite all of the above, the mainstream business culture still lingers in a feeling of unease about yoga and mindfulness.

Based on my own leadership experience, I suspect this feeling has roots in a common bias that paints wisdom practices for the meek. I still remember the quizzical stares I was getting from my team when I openly started practicing yoga and meditation on business trips and at corporate events. Eventually that initial reaction melted away when the realization dawned on everyone that the odd stuff I was doing wasn’t making me a weaker leader—actually, quite the opposite. The excellent top and bottom line numbers generated over a streak of four years were only matched by the increase in passion, engagement and accountability from the team.